The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Then she went off to work, leaving me with an unexpected smile on my face.

  Later in the morning, Don and Nina Felsenfeld stopped by from next door, delivering casseroles and kindness, nearly smothering me with their fluttering worry, but warming me as well. How they found out what happened last night I have no idea, but Elm Harbor is, as my wife keeps pointing out, a very small town.

  “Well, if you think of anything the firm can do to help,” Uncle Mal is saying, with a forced bonhomie, “you be sure to get in touch.”

  He means get in touch with Meadows. He is tired of me again. I can tell.

  “I will.” I make myself say it. “And thanks for calling.”

  Mallory Corcoran actually laughs. “Oh, Talcott, wait a minute. Don’t hang up. We haven’t even gotten to why I called yet. I was going to call you anyway, even before I heard about what happened.”

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  Another potent laugh booms over the miles. “No, no, everything’s just fine. Listen, Talcott, on this judge thing? Your wife must have a secret admirer.”

  “A secret admirer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Meaning what?” I ask uneasily, no longer thinking about last night’s assault, worrying now that the White House has discovered something about my wife’s possible extramarital activities, the ones concerning which I promised Dr. Young I would give her the benefit of the doubt. Then I realize Uncle Mal is suggesting that Kimmer’s chances are getting better, not worse.

  “My sources tell me that the President’s people are souring a bit on Professor Hadley. He isn’t out of the running yet, but he’s teetering. The Republicans had him down as a Felix Frankfurter type, this big political liberal who was also a judicial conservative, because that’s what you can glean from what little he’s written. They liked that combination, figured they could make the Democrats happy and warm their own right wing at the same time. That’s the line somebody sold them, anyway.”

  “I see.”

  “Not a bad idea, either. The President has had some rocky confirmation fights, and I think he’d love a smooth one.”

  “I’m sure.” I have carried the portable phone into my study, absently massaging my wounded ribs. The front window shows the same endless rain as the back. Hobby Road, as usual in midmorning, is pretty much empty, for children are at school and parents are at work or the supermarket or aerobics or wherever parents go these days.

  “That was the idea, anyway,” he continues. “But I hear that somebody’s been feeding them transcripts of these after-dinner talks Professor Hadley has given here and there, and now they’re thinking they have a crypto-liberal at the top of their list. He may not publish this stuff, but, well, some of his ideas look pretty screwed up.”

  “I see,” I say slowly.

  “Whereas in Kimmer’s case . . . well, Talcott, given your father . . . let’s just say that the President has a right flank to please, and nominating the daughter-in-law of Oliver Garland would have a certain . . . cachet. Plus she’s black. A black woman. A three-fer.”

  “Lest we forget.”

  “You sound upset, Talcott.”

  “No, no.” There is no way to explain to Uncle Mal how his last comments have stung me, and how they would sting my wife even more were I to share them, which I will not. A Garland marriage without secrets would probably be too happy, and that the family could never abide. “No, but . . . you said somebody’s feeding them the transcripts?”

  “Somebody from Elm Harbor, I hear.”

  “From Elm Harbor?”

  “From the university.” His voice is harder now.

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” I keep my tone neutral. Plainly, Uncle Mal thinks I am the one doing the feeding, and his attitude tells me what bad taste he thinks it is for a man to use his Washington connections to promote his own wife’s candidacy for the bench. Although, if he were to take a moment to consider the matter, he would remember that I have no Washington connections other than the one to whom I am currently speaking.

  “But, Talcott, the thing is, shoveling dirt on somebody this way can backfire.”

  “Backfire?”

  “What I mean is, whoever is feeding the White House those transcripts? Well, okay, maybe they can do Professor Hadley enough damage that he won’t get the seat. But, you know, there isn’t any kind of guarantee that the feeder’s candidate will get it, either. This kind of thing can hurt. If A is slinging mud at B, sometimes A and B both get so dirty that they’re knocked out of the . . .”

  “I get the idea.”

  “And even if it doesn’t backfire? Even if it works? Well, still, it’s just plain wrong.”

  Wrong. Now, there’s a word likely to die during the new century. “I agree.”

  “I’d find a way to put a stop to it if I were you.”

  “Uncle Mal, it isn’t me!” I blurt, feeling just as I did last night, the innocent black man looking guilty in the eyes of white power.

  “I never suggested that it was,” he intones piously.

  “Will you tell them?”

  “Tell who what?”

  “Tell the White House that it isn’t me.”

  “Well, if you really want me to,” he murmurs dubiously, implying that he is not sure they would believe him, or that they should.

  “Please.”

  “I will,” he says, but he means he won’t. “So, anyway, stay tuned.”

  “Right.”

  “Good. That’s what we’re here for. Oh, and let us know if there is anything the firm can do.”

  “Of course,” I tell him.

  Stuart, I am thinking as I hang up. That pompous idiot, Stuart Land.

  CHAPTER 29

  AN ENJOYABLE EVENING

  (I)

  “ARE YOU OKAY, TAL?” asks Shirley Branch, pecking me on the cheek as I step across the threshold of her condo. She peers sympathetically at the still-visible bruise under my eye. Outside, the wet New England winter wind carries on its annual December argument with those who prefer warmth. “I heard you almost got arrested. Let me have your coat. Where’s your wife?” One question stumbling over another, because Shirley possesses the kind of disordered brilliance that cannot keep up with itself.

  I shake my head and hand Shirley my parka, answering the first question for about the tenth time in the past two days and the second for about the hundredth time in the past year. No, I was not almost arrested, I tell her; a minor misunderstanding, nothing more. And Kimmer could not attend the dinner party because the sitter came down with the flu, which is true enough, even though, had the sitter been well, Kimmer would have found some other excuse. Dinner with law school faculty is, for my wife, a little bit like being stretched on the rack, only without the health benefits. Kimmer, who at surprising moments decides she likes my company, suggested that I should stay home, but when I told her I thought that was a very good idea, she changed her mind, citing the very arguments that persuaded us to accept Shirley’s invitation to Saturday dinner in the first place: Shirley is the school’s first black female professor, and there is such a thing as solidarity, even in these fractured times. Shirley is my former student and research assistant, and there is such a thing as loyalty, even in these selfish times.

  But I think the real reason Kimmer wanted at least one of us to go was in order to spy on Marc Hadley, who is also on the guest list. Kimmer and Marc have not been in the same room since they became contenders for the vacancy on the court of appeals, and my path and Marc’s have barely crossed at the law school, not least because I have spent so much time away. I think Kimmer, who is a good deal less intimidated by my colleagues than she thinks she is, decided that it is time to take his measure.

  Until it turned out we had no sitter: then she sent me on alone.

  “Have you seen Cinque?” Shirley asks hopefully in her gentle Mississippi accent—Cinque being the quite formidable name of the quite unformidable terrier which now and then accompanies her to her small office in
violation of numerous university rules. “He got out somehow.”

  “I’m afraid not,” I tell her.

  “Are you really okay, Tal? I’m not sure you actually know everybody. You’ve met Reverend Young, right? No? Oh, you have? He’s my pastor. Your eye looks terrible. Are you sure you didn’t see Cinque out there? He’s not really a winter dog.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, Shirley,” I murmur, and she shrugs and tries to smile.

  I smile back as best I can. The pain in my ribs is less, but the stitches in my cheek itch terrifically. Stuart Land turns out to be away for a few days—in Washington, no less—so I have been unable to upbraid him for his efforts to sabotage Marc Hadley, if, indeed, Stuart is the one who is doing it. The stranger with the voluptuous voice has not called back with any further reassurances, but I no longer sense that I am being followed. Were things otherwise, I suppose I would have skipped the party.

  I am among the last of the guests to arrive. Marc and Dahlia Hadley are already here, as are Lynda Wyatt and her sleepy husband, Norm, the architect. And crafty old Ben Montoya, Lynda’s strong right hand, whose wife, like mine, is substituting for a babysitter sick with flu. Lem Carlyle and his wife are expected a little later, after their daughter’s ballet recital. Four of the most powerful members of the faculty, plus me. Shirley was my student ten years ago in the first torts class I ever taught. She is three years away from a tenure vote, but she already knows whose good opinions matter. And she is sufficiently street-wise to understand that evaluations of her scholarship, no matter how we try to fight it, will always be influenced, at least a little, by how much the evaluators like her as a person.

  Three guests have no direct university connections. My sometime counselor, Reverend Dr. Morris Young, is accompanied by his quiet wife, Martha, who is nearly as pudgy as he is—quiet, that is, outside of church, for her voice is the loudest, if not perhaps the best, in the choir, which sings all over the state. The other is rail-thin Kwame Kennerly, a shamelessly calculating politico with prematurely thinning hair and a magnificent goatee, along with a reputation as a rabble-rouser, implicated but never quite caught in several municipal scandals, who currently serves, as Kimmer likes to say, as the mayor’s special assistant in charge of keeping the minority community domesticated, although his job title reads “deputy chief of staff.” He is also, I realize as he slips his arm around her slim waist, Shirley’s boyfriend. And it occurs to me that Shirley is strengthening her ties not only with the most influential professors at the law school, but with two of the most influential figures in the city’s black community.

  In short, she is fitting in; I, her ex-teacher, beam.

  Kwame Kennerly, standing right behind Shirley with a wineglass in his hand, is quite rude as Shirley introduces me, presumably because he blames me for being my father’s son, an attitude I frequently encounter from activists of the left. (Those on the right are always in a great hurry to shake my hand, with as little reason.) I often see Kwame’s name in the Clarion, for he is one of those rising politicians who manage to be everyplace at once, but I have never met him. He is a long, sinewy man whose wide, blinking eyes disagree with you before you have opened your mouth. For this occasion, perhaps because Shirley lives on the water, he is sporting a navy blazer with brass buttons even though it is out of season, the sort of offense against which my mother used to rage. As if for balance, he wears a round hat of bright orange kente cloth. The riot of color—the hat, the blazer, his dark skin, his ebon beard—is likely to be of quite intimidating effect on the white liberals present. If he feels out of place he is determined not to let on.

  Shirley Branch lives in a sprawling condominium complex fronting on Elm Harbor’s narrow and seaweed-clogged beach. Her one-story unit is not very large: a bedroom that apparently doubles as her study, a kitchen the size of a closet, a single bathroom, and a long area that does duty as both living room and dining room, although the dining table, which seats twelve, takes up half the space. For the same money (so she has told me more times than I can remember), she could have bought a three-bedroom townhouse on the other side of the complex, but she would not have had her spectacular view of the water. “I don’t need much space,” she likes to say, “because it’s only just me and Cinque.” Cinque, I should explain, is Shirley’s third dog of the same name, stretching all the way back into college: she makes sure we all know she selected the appellation long before Steven Spielberg made it famous.

  To sit in Shirley’s condo, to gaze out the glass doors, across the balcony, to beach and smooth black water not fifty yards away, is almost to be transported back to Oak Bluffs.

  Almost.

  Shirley is a slim, flat-footed woman with a long, sad face and prominent teeth—what we used to call a horsey face when I was a child. Her eyes are a little bit too sincere, her flip hairdo is a little bit too pressed, her movements are a little bit too frenetic: even as a student, she had a tendency to overdo. Her work is principally about race, and she is determinedly, aggressively, almost palpably leftish. To hear Shirley tell it, no problem facing America or the world has any cause but white racism. Her mind is keen and energetic, she loves to write, but her scholarship lacks, I suppose, a certain subtlety, an attention to nuance, studied consideration of alternatives—she is, in a word, pigheaded, which is probably one reason we almost decided not to hire her. Marc Hadley led the opposition.

  I wonder whether Shirley knows that.

  I wander into the area that serves as both living room and dining room—sofa and loveseat at one end, glass-topped dining-room table at the other—and find Marc already holding forth, for he can no more resist an audience than the press can resist a scandal. Shirley shrugs in what might almost be apology as she hangs my coat in the crowded closet by the front door. Lynda Wyatt smiles merrily as I enter, raising her glass in ironic salute: she does try to like me, I must give her that. Marc’s greeting is so perfunctory that it is really a dismissal, but he is busy lecturing, into it now, tweedy arms pumping madly as he entertains the guests with his latest theory. Gregarious Dahlia does her best to make up for his rudeness, hugging me like a long-lost brother and asking after my family. Old Ben Montoya, scrawny yet still strong, puts a powerful hand on my shoulder and whispers that he heard I’d been arrested. I turn and glare, not at Ben, but at Shirley, who grins nervously and shrugs as if to say, It’s not my fault—I don’t start rumors, I just spread them.

  My gaze finally settles on Marc himself, my wife’s rival, a man to whom I once felt reasonably close: Brother Hadley, as Dear Dana Worth likes to call him, or Young Marc, as the mischievous Theo Mountain prefers, for Marc possesses the kind of presence that inspires facetiousness. He smells, as always, of the rather pleasant raspberry tobacco he favors, for a battered old pipe is one of his many affectations. He pays no attention to the state’s recently enacted law forbidding smoking in the common areas of office buildings, having already decided for himself that it is unconstitutional, and nobody seems ready to challenge him, so the pipe travels with him everywhere around Oldie, although I notice he has not lit it at Shirley’s home. Marc is esteemed, quite properly, as one of the best brains on the faculty, a reputation, it seems, which justifies his failure to cut or even comb the gray-blond hair that falls past his ears, as well as his failure to shave more than once or twice a week, or to put on a tie, or to polish his shoes. He teaches jurisprudence and he teaches criminal law and he teaches learned seminars on the lives of the great judges and the coming death of law itself. Students are in awe of him. Most of his colleagues admire him. Some of us like him. Despite his ego, he is a kind man, always willing to give of his time and talent to those just starting out, and would be a considerable academic star but for the single failing I mentioned earlier: he simply does not write. His scholarly reputation rests not only on his single book—The Constitutional Mind, published almost twenty years ago—but on a single scintillating chapter of the book, Chapter Three, always written that way, capitalized, sometimes wit
h no further citation: But Hadley’s Chapter Three has already refuted that argument, a sympathetic scholar might contend. In the famous Chapter Three, Marc presented what is commonly accepted as the best analysis ever of Benjamin Cardozo’s judicial style, and used it to present a critique of constitutional theory that remains in vogue today. Even Dana Worth, who despises Marc, concedes in her sober moments that she knows of no book as influential—no chapter as influential—written by a legal scholar in the past half-century. The book was a blistering attack on what has come to be called judicial activism, written by a professed liberal, but one who calls himself old-style, preferring what he calls the democratic liberalism of grass-roots organizing to the bureaucratic liberalism of litigation and legislation.

  A dazzling thinker and fine teacher, my former friend Marc Hadley but I hope he remains a law professor.

  At last I tune in Marc’s lecture. He is talking, as usual, too fast, but I capture the gist. “You see, if Griswold is correct—if decisions about birth control are to be made by women and their doctors—then marriage itself is obsolete. I mean constitutionally obsolete. Just look at the findings of history and anthropology and you will discover that Freud turns out to have been right all along. Defenders of traditional marriage, especially those who argue that the marital relationship is somehow natural, point out that it exists in some form in just about every culture we have ever discovered. But what does that prove? Only that every culture has faced the same problem. Marriage evolved to solve the problem of how society would cabin the human urge to reproduce, which is the strongest urge humans possess, except for the urge among the weak-minded to invent supernatural beings to worship because they’re so afraid of dying.” A chuckle to soften the blow he believes he has dealt. Then he resumes. “You see, marriage is, historically, about nothing but reproduction and economics—that is, children and money. Married couples bear and raise children. The marital unit earns and consumes and acquires property. That’s it. All the rest of marriage law is surplusage. But now, with the evolution of technology and of culture, reproduction is no longer a matter of marriage. Unmarried women reproduce and there is no social sanction. Married women decline to reproduce and there is no social sanction. And not only is there no social sanction—there is a constitutional right. So, you see, we have this area of law that is built entirely on a social understanding that no longer exists. Once severed from reproduction, marriage becomes irrational. The law of marriage, then, is not reasonably related to any legitimate state purpose, which is the fundamental standard that any statute must meet under the Constitution. And there we have it. Marriage law is unconstitutional.”